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Hoping for a Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn

By Nick Fox November 12, 2009 3:39 pmNovember 12, 2009 3:39 pm

Robert Wright for The New York TimesRoberta’s restaurant in Bushwick.

Ben Flanner’s 6,000-square-foot rooftop garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, seemed ambitious when Marian Burros wrote about it in June. But now, Mr. Flanner is working with the Bushwick locavores at Roberta’s restaurant to create a rooftop farm as much as six or seven times that size.

They’re having a fund-raiser at 8 p.m. on Friday at Starr Space at 108 Starr Street (Knickerbocker Street) in Bushwick for what they’re calling Brooklyn Grange Farms.

Chris Parachini, one of the restaurant’s owners, said the plan was to sell produce from a farmstand and some specialty items directly to restaurants. “When the community buys enough from the farm, the amount supplied to restaurants will be meager,” he said.

“The ultimate goal is adding fiscal sustainability to the sustainability list,” he said. “To have a working farm that stands on its own two feet while servicing the same exact locale it operates in.”

Mr. Flanner said the farm in Greenpoint wasn’t big enough to pay for workers, insurance, etc., but he was encouraged by the amount of support it received from neighbors and chefs. “We had hundreds of people asking to buy the produce and volunteering to help,” he said.

A viable urban farm needed to be bigger, he said. They are looking for a large factory or warehouse with as much as 40,000 square feet of rooftop whose owner would be willing to donate the space for energy savings, tax breaks and maybe even a cut of the proceeds.

“The plan is to have something by spring,” he said.

Roberta’s already grows about 20 percent of its needs, in a good week, in a small roof garden in back of the restaurant and in a backyard garden several blocks away, Mr. Parachini said.